A Lotus Grows in the Mud

by Goldie Hawn

  I had such high expectations for this movie, for how it was going to look and feel, but now all I feel is a mass of butterflies in the pit of my stomach. I say to Kurt, “Even if I hadn’t been playing the role of Kay, I still would have hated her. She had a very complex character, and the editing of her scenes needed to be handled with great compassion, wisdom and experience. It was all a matter of someone else’s perspective, I guess—it always is—but I just wish I had known the vision of our director. Maybe I never asked in the first place.”

  Everyone else looked good; their characters were rounded and believable and true. Christine Lahti, as my best friend, was outstanding (and later won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress—and deserved it, I might add), but my character doesn’t look like the character I thought I was playing.

  Holding myself together, I stand as the lights come up, and cling to Kurt’s arm.

  The audience seems to be unusually quiet. Half smiles are being thrown at one another as we all head toward the exit.

  Heads of studios file past, faces somber, their eyes cast down. One of them, catching my eye, throws over his shoulder, “We’ve got some work to do.”

  We! I thought I wasn’t producing this movie!

  The following morning the studio calls me.

  “We’d like you to come in for a meeting this afternoon, Goldie. We’re all going to sit down and talk about what needs to be done to fix this movie.”

  Despite my sadness at how things turned out, I feel intense relief. It’s the studio heads who will now help us do whatever we can to get this movie back on track.

  Jonathan arrives silently and takes his place at the conference table. He can barely look me in the eye. He hates me already, I can tell. My heart sinks to the pit of my stomach, and I wish I could somehow get us back to the place we were when we first met and fell a little bit in love. But there is no getting around this feeling of sadness.

  One of the studio heads opens the meeting. “I guess you both know why we’re here. We’d like to talk about some changes we want to make, because, to be honest, this isn’t really working for us, guys. We have some notes; we’d like to hear your thoughts; and then, between us, we can decide what needs to be done. We know this is the first cut, but we think that some of the characters need more defining, and the timeline is a bit confusing.”

  I feel horrible. I keep hearing my pitch to them almost a year ago. It will be fresh, new. We can merge the forties into the eighties. It should feel like a musical. It’s going to be great. I cringed at how much I sounded like a producer with all the shuck and jive and all the radda radda. I know in my heart that I have dramatically let them down.

  “Goldie, we know that you’ve got some things that you want to say, so why don’t you go ahead.”

  “Okay,” I begin, clearing my throat. “Well, clearly, I’m not happy with the way this movie turned out. It isn’t just that I’m unhappy with my character—that’s a small part of that—it’s that this is not the movie I sold to this company.”

  Turning to Jonathan, I tell him, “I never wanted to stand in your way or be the squeaky wheel, Jonathan, and I deliberately tried not to do that. But I guess that I’m just going to have to say at this point that because I promised a certain movie to Warner Brothers, and even though I relinquished my producer’s role, I am now going to have to take off my blond wig and put on my producer’s hat.”

  Jonathan hardly says a word as the discussions continue and I vent my frustrations about the film. I become a lot more vocal and much more heated than I ever intended to be. My emotions undoubtedly get the better of me. Jonathan sits there expressionless, but I can see in his eyes how offended he is. In fighting for the integrity of my promise to the studio, I know in my heart that I have lost a dear friend. Worse than that, I have become his worst nightmare. The idea of being that person in his mind upsets me greatly.

  A small part of me, however, can’t help but wonder how he would have reacted or if things would have been different if I had been a man. Would he have sat and listened if I had spoken my mind frankly and expressed my opinions forcefully? This isn’t about Jonathan; this is a Hollywood problem.

  But it is too late. I cannot change my gender, and I cannot take back what I have said. I have been tiptoeing around for so long, afraid of standing tall and giving credence to the things that I know. In fearing that the suggestions I might make would be offensive, I didn’t make them, even though they were based on my own experiences and point of view of character development, my understanding of the story lines and the film’s overall social commentary.

  The next few months become my worst nightmare. The studio expects me to help fix this movie, so I become the go-between. They ask me to approach a new writer and work with him on script changes. Despite still not having the producer title or credit, I spend the next few weeks running back and forth in the middle of the night with new pages. When we finally come up with rewrites that the studio is happy with, they commission one full week of reshoots, a very expensive proposition that involves bringing back all the actors and starting from scratch. Nobody is happy at the prospect, least of all me.

  Jonathan is invited to come back and direct these new scenes, but when he arrives on set I can feel nothing but loathing from him. All I can think of when I look at his face is the joy we once shared, the laughter and the kisses and the hugs. I remember the hilarious casting sessions, the late-night sandwiches, choosing Kurt as Lucky, the fun we had during the jitterbug scenes, the way he was so darling with my mother. I so admired his energy and his passion and his vision. There is now so much misunderstanding between us, and I don’t know what I can do to repair it.

  Equally distressing for me, I can feel huge resentment from some of my fellow actors too. I am sure many of them think this is just a huge ego trip for me, to make my character look better, but they are really missing the point. To try to defend myself and what I’m trying to do for the movie would only fuel the flames, so I say nothing and just try to get the work done.

  I have never felt quite so disenfranchised. Jonathan, whose help I would have loved, sits in a corner watching us work our way through this whole ghastly experience, completely rudderless. At one point, when Kurt and I finish a scene, I turn to Jonathan and say, “How was that, Jonathan?”

  He looks at me with a passive expression and says, “Well, I don’t know, Goldie, how was that?”

  It is all I can do to stop myself from running off the set. I feel so completely isolated. I started out with such good intentions for this movie, and I can’t believe that this is how it has ended. I’m not doing this to spite you! I want to scream. I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this because Warner Brothers might ditch our movie.

  The revised script trickles in. The final pages are delivered on the last day. We shoot them mechanically, trying to make them work. In the end, some of them do and some of them don’t, but there is no more time and no more money. I drive off the lot that night, wondering how I allowed all this to happen. After all, we create our own realities. And my fear created this one.

  When the movie finally comes out later that year, 1984, Jonathan stays away. His publicity people issue a disclaimer saying that he had nothing to do with the final cut.

  I’m hurt. I go away for a while, to get away from Hollywood and all the hype. I fly to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to visit the eight Indian children I sponsor on a reservation, to get back to what really matters to me.

  Sitting in a street café in the most beautiful surroundings one morning, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper, I feel much better. The scenery is breathtaking, the air is so clear, and the waitress comes to my table and pours me another cup. Just as I am about to take a sip, I spot a headline on the Entertainment pages: GOLDIE FIGHTS FOR CONTROL.

  It takes me so off guard, I stop breathing. I read through the text about how I snatched control of Swing Shift because I didn’t like the way I looked. Over the next few days and we
eks, the stories start to repeat themselves, appearing all over. Some claim that I thought Christine Lahti outshone me in the first cut, so I insisted that her performance be reduced. In each case, when approached for a quote Warner Brothers replies, “No comment.” This is what really pierces my heart.

  No comment? Is no one going to defend me? I realize then that the studio’s relationship with the director is sacrosanct. It is the one relationship that they protect above all. My blood freezing in its veins, I also fear that this could be the end of any chance I ever had of working with another great director.

  Needing to run, to escape to somewhere pure and clean and clear, I jump in my car and drive out into the arid desert. I need to remind myself of the world outside my industry, of the ancient rituals and customs that ground me to this life. Collecting one of my adopted children from the reservation, I take him to a Hopi Indian village to watch the ritual corn dance. Snuggled next to this beautiful seven-year-old boy, sitting with our legs dangling over the roof of an adobe building as the sun sets warm and golden over the purple mountains, I watch the men dancing beneath us to a hypnotic drumbeat, celebrating the fruits of their harvest, which this year have been pitifully meager.

  They work hard for a living, I think.

  It was a great leveler. That no matter who we are, sometimes things don’t always work out the way we want.

  Right or wrong, I acquired a reputation after Swing Shift that to this day I’m not sure I don’t still have. One director who was approached to do a movie with me a short time later actually called the studio and said, “I’ve heard she is difficult to work with. Is this something I want to get into?”

  When I heard what he’d said, I thought I was going to die.

  It is not just a question of mudslinging, but a little bit of who I am too, I suppose. I guess in my wish for things to be the best they can be, I don’t play that game so well.

  The question is how do we as women become realized, how do we deal with our own power? Whether it is in our relationships or in the workplace, it seems we are always negotiating for our own voice and always afraid of speaking what we feel. As a little girl, I was shy. I wasn’t comfortable with my own ideas, never believing they were worthy of being heard. As I grew older, I was afraid of my own strength and worried that if I showed too much power it would make me less attractive to men, or a threat to women.

  But now, after all this time, I throw down the gauntlet. The only path to happiness is to really be all that you can be. To be secure and unafraid of speaking your own mind. If your intentions are not just to win the game, then you can feel good that you have spoken your mind without malice or anger but just from the depths of your truth.

  The more we can feel emotionally liberated, the more whole we can feel as people. We might say to ourselves afterward, Gee, I shouldn’t have said that, or maybe I should have said it differently. Well, okay, maybe you need to work on your presentation—it is important to be conscious and compassionate and act with great civility—but don’t forsake your own wisdom because you fear you will lose something.

  What is more important? Losing your face, or losing your integrity?

  I’ve seen Jonathan Demme many times in the years since SwingShift. I think we have come to understand that we were both placed in an impossible situation and that neither of us handled it quite as well as we might have. We were both young; we were both growing. We were both fighting for our positions. We both had strong beliefs as well as our own insecurities. To be less seasoned is to be less tolerant and more afraid. The more seasoned you are, the more willing you are to let others shine.

  If I knew then what I know today, I might never have burst out at him like that in front of the studio heads. I would have tried to be more sensitive and more mindful of his role in the process. I now understand all of his reasons for feeling so threatened by me. Although I became the scapegoat, I can see why he felt undermined both creatively and as a man.

  When Jonathan went on to direct The Silence of the Lambs and won an Oscar, I rushed to see the film and loved every minute of it. I mean, what a brilliant piece of filmmaking that truly was! I sat down and wrote him a heartfelt letter, telling him what an amazing job he did and what a fantastic filmmaker I believed he was. He wrote me a beautiful letter back.

  By reaching out to each other in this simple way, by showing tolerance and kindness to each other and putting all the pain and misunderstanding behind us, we achieved closure on what was, for us both, a very bittersweet experience.

  And, best of all, I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: that the power to forgive is the greatest power there is.

  With Kurt, in love and in bed, on the set of Swing Shift. (© 1984 Warner Bros. Inc.)

  keeping the fame

  The keys to maintaining a healthy relationship are respect, desire, forgiveness and love.

  postcard

  Oh, give me a warm and flattering light to shine on my face as I confront myself in the mirror to take a deep howling look into the troubles that have lined and distorted me. This reflection is slowly looking more and more clouded and grotesque as the ending draws near of yet another lover who passionately ejects out of my life to become another memory unforgotten. The streaks and shrieks of anger are sometimes like firecrackers exploding from small ignitions so minuscule that they are barely visible and, after the blast, there is no trace of their existence. A series of random booms that make my head ache in its total circumference. The heaviness in my chest and back is reminiscent of times where similar feelings of sadness and aloneness were brought upon by the hard realities of the utter futility and uselessness of a relationship and how the ending is so close and yet so damn difficult to realize.

  Why must we always get to a point in an incompatible relationship that we become demolition experts and blow up the other person’s self-esteem and paint them to be valueless and worthless human beings? The act of destroying self-image is such a devastating part of the denouement of a passionate love story that it almost makes it not worth the experience. How many times must one live this story before one can reroute the landing and make it smooth and without too many bumps on the runway? My mind is sound and sensible, but to realize that I am still human is most painful. To recognize my state of constant instability is maddening.

  What creates these weaknesses, and what prevents us from improving our choices? When will the roads I choose be paved with concrete instead of quicksand? When will I stop feeling guilty for who I am and for being intelligent? Or when will I cease to cringe when I am more quick-witted than a man, and when will I stop protecting the ever-so-fragile egos of my men and start to stand up to the truth? The painful thing about enlightenment is that you cannot go back to the warm safe place that ignorance keeps so impenetrable for us. Oh cursed are the enlightened, for the only protection from knowledge and experience is more knowledge and experience.

  —Diary entry, 1982, when my life seemed to be falling apart

  My first marriage lasted six years. My second, four. I was never to marry again. Relationships, even ones once as happy as these, often hit insurmountable problems. It is easy to point the finger, to blame the other person. Sometimes we’re right to do so. I suppose I could easily blame my career, my money or my power and leave it at that. But that’s too simple. I remember what someone once said to me: whenever you point a finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.

  It is important to remember the good things about my marriages, the happy memories that still fill my heart. Gus was such a sweetheart. He was with me when I was first discovered, and he helped me deal with so much. I loved being his wife and taking care of him.

  Bill helped me through one of the most fearful times of my life, the prospect of losing Oliver. He comforted me with his humor, and was tender with me as a vulnerable new mother. He also gave me the gift of his grandmother, Tessie, whose rose never seemed to fade. She was full of life and vitality and joy—a window into the spirit of hi
s soul. Being with his big Italian family in Portland, Oregon, was like going home for me. It gave me a sense of normalcy when there was so little that was normal in my life. Sleeping in the attic with baby Oliver, a statue of Mother Mary at my side, allowed me the privilege of witnessing a whole new family culture that reminded me so much of my own.

  But it is also important to remember what went wrong in those relationships. I asked myself over and over what I could have done better to make them work. I’m not perfect. I want to know how I can grow as a human being because of what I faced as my truth, what responsibility I take. If you don’t take responsibility, then you’ll never grow. You will never learn. And you will only repeat your mistakes.

  By the time of my divorce from Bill, I had two small children who were both losing a daddy. I couldn’t believe that everything I had planned had come so unraveled. I always thought that when I got married and had children, I would stay with their father no matter what. Divorce wasn’t something anyone did in my family. Even at the end, my parents never divorced; they just took leave of each other. It was such a bittersweet time, for I truly believed I was doomed to live a life as a single parent. I tucked my kids in each night, wishing they had a father to do it too, and then I cried myself to sleep, wondering where it had all gone wrong.

  I was trying to do it all—work, make movies, be a good mother, be a soccer mom to Oliver, take Katie to dance classes and keep a happy home. Juggling all this in my life, I was devastated. Was I now living my worst image of how Hollywood stars end up?

  I couldn’t imagine how, approaching my mid-thirties with a demanding job and, by now, celebrity status, I could ever meet someone who would be prepared to take me on, with all my baggage. More important, I feared I would never find someone who would love my children as much as I do, and give them a normal family life.